Idea: StreetPilot Emulator

Well.. this idea came to me the other day while I was thinking about GPS solutions in Linux and I wanted to share it. Maybe it's been discussed before, but I couldn't find it.

I have a StreetPilot ColorMap GPS unit (I have had it about 5 years) and despite its limited maps and routing capabilities, it is still more enjoyable to use in the car than any of the PC based GPS software out there that I have seen. I understand some of the newer StreetPilot models are among the best GPS's out there.

It strikes me that these devices are generally fairly low-end and simple systems and might be good targets for emulation. Generally any device embedding GPS is communicating with the GPS module via some internal serial interface, so the only dedicated hardware function that it provides would be pretty easy to simulate communicating with a real GPS (A garmin unit might be required here of course since the software likely speaks to the hardware with the Garmin protocol instead of NMEA)

Anyway, it's an interesting idea; now all that is left is to write everything

Yes I saw the nroute stuff linked somewhere too -- still, it looks like it's made for a laptop and not really a carpc. The StreetPilots are all button/touchscreen based so they make a lot of sense for use with a carpc configured like most of us use. Maybe it'll be good stuff, though. We'll have to wait and see!

Well the complete (presumably unencrypted from my initial investigations) firmware is available on their website, so getting started on this project will not be hard.

Does anyone know anybody with one of these newer streetpilots (2610, 2620, or 2650) that would be willing to assist with getting the exact hardware specs (high res scans of the pcb's would probably be sufficient). There is not any information that I can find as to even what CPU is in the thing or how much ram/flash it has internally. I suspect it's ARM based.